Whiney nays and Cheap Mondays always bring me down
By Greg Strange
web posted January 9, 2006
Quick, when someone mentions the country of Sweden, what's
the first thing that comes to mind? Anything at all? For most
people, it's meatballs, or maybe the fact that it has one of the
goofiest sounding languages in the world, and that‘s about it.
Which isn't surprising since it's a pretty quiet place where very
little of any particular consequence ever happens.
There was a time decades ago when it had a racy reputation for
being a place where everyone was blonde, good-looking and
sexually liberated, the place to go if sensuality and hedonistic
pleasure-seeking were things upon which you wanted to base a
lifestyle. Reference was made to that old reputation in the 1999
movie "Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me" when a
woman told Powers, "You've had more sex on the job than a
Swedish stewardess."
But that's all pretty passé in this day and age given that sexual
freedom -- or, to put it another way, promiscuity -- is rampant
throughout the Western world. Still, no one should be surprised
to learn that Sweden is the most secular of all European
countries, the number of regular church-goers having dwindled to
a very small percentage of the population.
But it's not small enough for Bjorn Atldax, the designer of a
provocative logo for a trendy new punk-rock style of jeans
known as Cheap Mondays. The logo depicts a skull with a cross
turned upside down on its forehead, all for the purpose of
making young people question Christianity, as if it wasn't already
an irrelevancy to most young Swedes anyway.
"It is an active statement against Christianity," Atldax told the
Associated Press. "I'm not a Satanist myself, but I have a great
dislike for organized religion." Atldax believes that Christianity is
a ‘force of evil" that has sparked wars throughout history and
therefore needs to be discouraged.
Of course, if Atldax were to acquire a more substantive
knowledge of recent world history than that which can be
gleaned from peacenik bumper stickers, he might realize that
Christianity has long since outgrown its proselytizing, territory-
conquering days. To call Christianity a "force of evil" now is
simply nonsense. Looking at the most destructive forces of evil
of the past century -- Nazism, fascism, communism -- and the
tens of millions who were slaughtered in their name, one can't
help but notice a pronounced dearth of Christian-influenced
warmongering.
Despite its indifference, and sometimes outright hostility, towards
Christianity, Sweden is one of the most often cited countries as a
great place to go by Americans who are dissatisfied with their
own country in some way or who swear they'll bail out of the
U.S. if ____ (insert Republican name here) is elected president.
In fact, if I had a nickel for every time I'd heard some left-leaning
American sing the praises of that snowbound Shangri-la, I'd be .
. . Well, I wouldn't be rich, but I would have filled up a fair-sized
change jar by now, enough to go out and get a nice meal of my
favorite ethnic food, which wouldn't include anything Swedish
since the food, as well as the country itself, is the epitome of
blandness.
Admittedly, though, as social welfare states go, it's done pretty
well, perhaps better than most other European welfare states. As
pointed out in the CIA World Factbook: "Aided by peace and
neutrality for the whole 20th century, Sweden has achieved an
enviable standard of living under a mixed system of high-tech
capitalism and extensive welfare benefits."
That's all fine and dandy, but what most America-bashing
Sweden admirers, as well as hipster logo designers, fail to realize
is that whatever characteristics they find so appealing about the
place are all possible because of the greatness of one particular,
predominantly Christian country: the United States. That's
because without its military might, Sweden would be just another
province within a larger Nazi, or perhaps a Soviet, empire. How
uncool would that be?
It's one of those nattering little details of history that your garden
variety, social utopian doesn't like to expend too many brain cells
thinking about. For ideological reasons it's just so much more
palatable to believe that Sweden's neutrality, pacifism, welfare
statism and general social liberalism are the causes of its relative
success. Then one can believe that if all Western countries would
simply emulate Sweden, the West would basically be trouble
free rather than having to deal with the nastiness of things like
global warming and apocalyptic Islamic terrorism.
And speaking of apocalyptic Islamic terrorism, interestingly,
Osama bin Laden mentioned Sweden in his personalized
videotaped communiqué to the American people just before the
2004 election. In disputing President Bush's claim that part of the
reason for the 9/11 attacks was because al-Qaeda hates
freedom, bin Laden said, "Let him tell us why we did not strike
Sweden, for example." In other words, bin Laden was saying,
Sweden is free, but al-Qaeda didn't attack it; therefore, it's not
about freedom.
There‘s actually some truth to that. What it's more about is the
fact that the U.S. supports Israel and in plenty of other ways
dares to stick its nose into Middle Eastern affairs. Sweden, on
the other hand, is an innocuous, pacifistic, inconsequential little
country that minds its own business and doesn't give
Islamofascists an excuse to attack it -- or at least it hasn't yet.
But despite what bin Laden said about not striking Sweden,
jihad is all about killing infidels and Sweden's chock full of ‘em.
And like other European countries, Sweden has had its share of
Muslim immigration. Malmo, the third largest city in Sweden, has
acquired a population that is 40 percent foreign, many of whom
are Muslims. As in other European countries, many Swedish
Muslims have difficulty assimilating, despite the country's
liberalism and social utopianism. Many Muslims in Malmo no
doubt have one foot in a radical Mosque and the other on a
banana peel.
So, while logo designer Bjorn Atldax is trying through his work
to eradicate the possibility that an occasional Swedish teenager
might take an interest in Christianity, a demographic time bomb is
ticking away in Sweden. Secular ethnic Swedes don't reproduce
themselves enough to grow their population while Muslim
immigrants do. The math is simple. Sweden is in far more danger
of going Islamic than it is of having some sort of Christian revival.
So where are the anti-Islam logos?
Orjan Andersson, the creator of Cheap Mondays, doesn‘t take
Altdax's message very seriously: "I don't believe in neither the
devil nor God. I'm not interested in religion, I'm more interested
in that the logo looks good."
Fine, Orjan, whatever floats your boat. But one of the
fundamental characteristics of human beings is that they need
something to believe in. It doesn't necessarily have to be religion,
but it needs to be something more than "that the logo looks
good" if life is to have much meaning or purpose. And while your
logo designer is busy misguidedly trying to wipe out the last
vestiges of Christian influence, the Muslims in your midst have a
very solid sense of purpose, and that purpose is for the world to
be Islamic.
Greg Strange's web site can be found at
http://www.greg-strange.com. (c) 2006 Greg Strange.
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